"And he said unto them, Go ye
into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." - Mark 16:15

On the Verge of losing Everything

I wanted to link this article from the BBC, I don't know if the man is a
Christian, but it is an example of an average man, usually
unknown to people at large, or indeed, often unknown to anyone, who's
life's falling apart.

It could be any one of us.

If he is a Christian, then great, he has the Lord to turn to, if he is
not a Christian, then it's a story of many people, looking to be
saved, to ask the Lord to help in this life, and the hope - the promise
of eternal life in Heaven. Christian or not, it could happen to
anyone. People need our help, we all need help in this difficult
life.

Although the article has a focus on state benefits, for me the story is
more than that. Just like many millions or billions of people, an
ordinary man with an ordinary life, having worked a few jobs here and
there, and finds himself still young, 43, but seemingly passed a sell
by date for the world. The world is a friend of none, for only in
Heaven do things not corrupt (Matthew
6:19.)

You're on the verge of losing everything - but you
don’t understand why

By Jon Kelly
BBC Stories
31 January 2018

A run of bad luck leaves one man struggling to make sense of the UK
benefits system. Very soon he is left with no income and at risk of
losing the roof over his head. Can he find his way through a bafflingly
complex maze of rules? Put yourself in his shoes.

Your name is Tony Rice. You're the sort of bloke who gets along with
everyone. Always making people laugh. Ever since you left school you've
been in and out of all sorts of jobs. Manual labour, mostly - builder,
dustman, crane driver, painter and decorator. Hawker Siddeley, the
aerospace company - you like it there, until the factory shuts.

You split up with your girlfriend so you ask your mum to put you up
until you can sort out a flat. Save a few quid. You're very close to
your mum and dad. They're your best friends, really. Your dad has lung
cancer and needs a bit of looking after. You take him for a drive most
days because he doesn't like staying in all the time. He's like you, not
a man to sit about. At one time he worked three jobs, all at once. Still
does half an hour each morning in the garden.

So you're back in the council house in Chingford, north-east London,
that you've called home since you were eight years old - even after you
left. Your sisters have moved out and had kids of their own but you want
to take care of your mum and dad, same as they took care of you.

And then you get a big shock. Suddenly, unexpectedly, your mum dies in
hospital, two weeks after she has a replacement heart valve fitted. It's
the day before she's supposed to get out.

Her death is hard for you to accept. You don't know how to process your
grief. All through your 43 years on Earth so far you've always tried to
be tough. You don't cry at the funeral. You want to be strong for your
sisters. You want to just get on with it. But the depression creeps up
and up on you.

It's just you and your dad in the house now. You've become his full-time
carer - there's no-one else left to look after him now mum is gone.
Anything he needs, you do it for him. His cancer spreads from his lungs
to his other organs until, inevitably, it kills him.

Two parents gone within two years. And now you're alone in the house.

The council says you have to move to a flat, so you pack up and go. You
like it. Decent size, first floor, communal gardens, nice neighbours. It
needs doing up but you aren't afraid of putting a bit of work in.

You're on the verge of losing everything - but you don’t understand why

You want to go back to work again so you go door-to-door selling Avon
products. You start to notice your neck feels stiff. Your back, too.
Must be from all that physical labour over the years. Plus a couple of
road accidents you had when you were younger. Once a driver did a U-turn
in front of you when you were on your motorbike. Your knees hit the car
first then you went over the roof and landed on your head. Years ago,
this was.

There's this bloke you get to know. Friend of a friend. You fetch his
paper every morning. Sometimes he cooks for you in return. One day he
invites you in for a drink. You go indoors and take a seat. There's
another fella there. You accept a drink from the friend of a friend.
He's been drinking already. Then he starts getting a bit loud, so you
ask him to keep it down.

He doesn't like that. Comes over and hits you. You're still in your
chair. You get up and have a pop in retaliation, then the other fella
separates you. There's an unopened packet of knives in the room. You see
it happening in slow motion. The friend of a friend selects a knife from
the packet. You don't think he's going to use it, but then he does. He
stabs you in the thigh. You try to grab the knife to defend yourself.
You get cut again in your arm and around your eye.

"Right", you say. "I'm getting out of here." You turn to leg it. "Don't
tell anyone about this," he says, and then he sticks the knife in your
shoulder blade. That's the worst one. You thought this bloke was all
right. You thought he was your mate. You got that wrong.

You go to hospital. They fix you up and send you home but the pain is
still bad. Your back and your neck. What's worse, you can't stop
thinking about the attack. Reliving it over and over. Lying awake.

The friend of a friend is jailed for the stabbing but that doesn't stop
your paranoia. You walk down the road looking at every single car that
passes, every motorbike. They might be coming for you. You see a pizza
delivery bloke. He's looking for an address. You think he might be a
hitman coming after you. He stops and looks at you. You think you're
going to be attacked again. You don't trust anyone.

You used to be really fit. Cycled all the time. Now you can't. And you
love your cycling. All your muscles lock up. Every time you wake up in
the morning, you're aching.

You go to your GP. He examines you and signs you off work for six
months. He says you have post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
There's no way you can work. You're also diagnosed with muscular
arthritis. That, plus the scars from the knife attack, means it's
painful to turn your neck or lift your arms above shoulder height.

You're on something called Employment Support Allowance. ESA.
Minimum-level state benefits, that means. It's for people who can't work
because of ill health or disability. You get housing benefit as well,
which goes straight to the council to pay for the flat.

Then a few weeks later the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) calls
you in.

It's a work capability assessment, they say. There's a form to fill in
first about what you can and can't do. Can you pick up a £1 coin? Can
you raise a hand to your head? Well, just about, though it's painful.
You go along and the person assessing you says you're fit for work. You
say you're not. Your GP agrees that you're not. But the assessor's
opinion outweighs any other. Your benefits are stopped - both the ESA
and the housing benefit.

You've got no money coming in. Nothing. You're falling in arrears with
your rent. Friends are feeding you. You go to your local food bank. It's
embarrassing. You don't like it. But the one round the corner isn't too
bad. They don't ask any questions. You just go there and get your stuff.
You push your bike, the bike you can't ride any more. They give you
pasta, potatoes, tins of soup, couscous - you don't like the couscous
much but you take it anyway, it's not like you can afford to be choosy.
Then you hang the shopping bags on the bike and push it home in the
rain.

You're losing weight because of the lack of food. You're still in pain.
You're still depressed. You used to be really outgoing. You liked
talking to people and going out and doing stuff but now you're just not
in the mood.

The council apply for a possession order of your flat. They go to court
and get one, suspended. They won't take the flat off you if you can make
payments towards the arrears - £300 a month.

You keep going back to the Job Centre and asking if they can do anything
for you. And finally - after seven months with no money coming in
whatsoever, the DWP tells you that you can go on a new benefit called
Universal Credit - the part of it that replaces Jobseeker's Allowance.
They told you before you weren't eligible, but apparently now you are.
You don't understand what's changed. There's no explanation. It seems as
though there's been a mistake somewhere.

Now you get £414.33 for your rent and £317.82 for living costs. It's
different from the benefits you were on before. Before, the Housing
Benefit was paid direct to the council for your rent. Now, you get the
housing costs and the living costs paid directly to you in one lump sum
- one of the features of Universal Credit introduced by your local MP,
Iain Duncan Smith.

Except you don't realise this - that the money is no longer going direct
to the council and you need to sort it out yourself. No-one explained it
to you, not in a way you understood, at least. You end up going even
further into arrears with the rent.

Universal credit

A new benefit for working-age people that replaces six benefits
- including Jobseeker's Allowance and Housing Benefit - and merges
them into one payment

It was designed to make claiming benefits simpler, and to ensure
no-one is better off claiming benefits than working

But it has proved controversial from the beginning, with reports
of IT issues, massive overspends and administrative problems

What is Universal Credit - and what's the problem?

Because you've been assessed fit for work, you're supposed to spend 35
hours a week looking for a job. But when the DWP summon you to a
jobseeker's meeting to ask what you're doing to find work, you don't get
the message. No-one tells you. There's no letter - not one that reaches
you, anyway. It could be that they've sent you the message
electronically - but you're no good with computers. You don't have one
at home and the sole time you tried to use one down the Job Centre you
didn't know what half the keys did.

So because you don't turn up to the jobseeker's meeting, you get what is
called a sanction - that means they stop the £317.82 for monthly living
costs.

You know nothing about this. You don't actually work out that you've
been sanctioned for 212 days. You just know there is less money coming
in.

All you have to live on is the £414.33 that's supposed to be for housing
costs. But you're still paying the council £300 a month for the earlier
rent arrears - which means you are left with £114.33 a month to subsist
on. That's £26.38 a week.

You can't survive on that. And, once again, you can't pay the rent.

You're back to relying on food banks and donations from friends. You
take the bracelet you wear around your wrist to the pawnbroker.

It's still not enough.

It seems that every time you go to the Job Centre, someone gives you a
different story about what you should be doing. You try to phone the DWP
to sort things out, but no-one seems able to help you there, either.
Each phone call costs you something like £8 - the claimant helpline is
premium rate from mobiles and you haven't got a landline.

Your rent arrears are now in excess of £10,000.

The council seeks a court order for your eviction. You're looking at
spending Christmas on the streets.

You go to see a legal adviser. You haven't been able to see a lawyer
until now, because benefits law isn't covered by legal aid any more, but
some housing law is.

Your lawyer and a Citizens Advice caseworker can't make head nor tail of
what's going on at first. Eventually, they work out that you've been
sanctioned. They write to the Universal Credit department repeatedly to
ask for an explanation - it takes a long time for them to figure out why
you have been sanctioned and what you could do to get the sanction
lifted.

But first you have to go to court to try and avoid eviction.

Your legal adviser is a man called Simon Mullings. He tells you how
serious the situation is. He's not going to sugar-coat it for you. The
council are trying to be reasonable, he says, but they have a statutory
duty to recover the lost rent. If you lose this case you'll be homeless.

You sit through three very scary hearings as your legal team argues your
case.

You have a barrister, Mary-Rachel McCabe. She tells your whole
Kafkaesque story to the judge.

"Tony has been failed by a malfunctioning system," she says. "From the
moment Tony claimed Universal Credit last year, he suffered the
consequences of its arbitrary rules and procedures, and so was
immediately plunged into further rent arrears and other debt."

The judge is visibly shocked. The system is "appalling", she says.

McCabe tells the court that the sanction and the finding that you are
fit for work are now being challenged with the help of a benefits
adviser from Citizens Advice.

If that's successful it will give you an extra £317.82 a month and allow
you to pay your rent. A new court hearing is set for May. That's a
reprieve. If you can show a pattern of payment by then, maybe you won't
be evicted.

Mullings, your legal advisor, tells you it might not feel like it, but
you're one of the lucky ones. At least because this was a housing case
you had legal representation. If you hadn't, you would have been
steamrollered.

The court you've been going to, Edmonton County Court, has seen lots of
similar Universal Credit cases, Mullings says. Other courts that he
works in nearby - Stratford, Romford - they're not seeing these cases
yet, because Universal Credit hasn't been rolled out into those areas.
"But they're coming down the line," says Mullings. "So this is the
vanguard of a tsunami of Universal Credit problems. Unless the
government radically changes tack."

For you, though, things are looking up. It's still a struggle but it's
getting a bit better. You feel like you can't move on while this is
hanging over you. You want to get stronger. Like you used to be. Nothing
ever used to get you down.

"I've always tried my best, even though my body really hurts," you say.
"I just keep going, I'm like that. But the pressure - I can't think
straight, I can't concentrate on one thing any more. I think about
nothing but my problems."

A friend asks if you've seen a film called I, Daniel Blake. It's about a
man caught up in the nightmare bureaucracy of the benefits system. You
haven't had time to watch it. But you say you should play the lead in
the sequel.

Your name is Tony Rice, and you're not going to let this break you.

“The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me
to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the
brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, ....
This day is this scripture fulfulled in your ears.”Luke 4:18-21